Current Stegner Chair

Overview:

Wallace Stegner

The chair is expected to work in residence on her/his research project and share in
the intellectual community of the department. We are a well-published, friendly department
with a thriving graduate program situated in a spectacular mountain environment. The
chair will also present the annual Wallace Stegner Lecture usually held in the Spring
semester.

Spring 2015 Stegner Chair

A Message from Dr. Fiege

I’m pleased and honored to serve as the Stegner Professor during spring semester 2015.

My first goal is to support the faculty members in the Department of History, Philosophy,
and Religious Studies in their efforts to advance their scholarship and develop their
undergraduate and graduate programs. Related to that, I’m here to help the department’s
graduate students with their scholarship and introduce them to new ideas that they
might find exciting and useful. The Stegner Seminar will be a means to that end and
will center on reading, discussion, and direct engagement with a series of visiting
speakers called the Friends of Stegner, a group that includes Fredrik Jonsson and
Vicky Albritton from the University of Chicago, Marsha Weisiger from the University
of Oregon, and Nancy Langston from Michigan Technological University.

I’m also using my time in the Stegner Chair to work on a book project tentatively
titled Elegant Conservation: Recovering Community, Connectivity, and Continuity in a Time
of Unprecedented Uncertainty. This project, which will be the subject of the Stegner Lecture on the evening of
Wednesday, March 25 at the Museum of the Rockies, examines the history and future
prospects of more holistic, process-oriented, socially responsive approaches to conservation
that began to take shape in the 1990s.

Montana State University is a wonderful university with a beautiful campus in a stunning
landscape, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be here with such fine colleagues, students,
and friends.